Hi Everyone!
First post here but I have been a member for a while.
I have been watching Thomas's videos and blog posts for a long time, great inspiration!
After chasing DX for years and contesting mostly with 100W I moved to 100% QRP in 2003, still chasing DX (restarted my DXCC to make it 100% QRP) and still contesting. Sitting at around 278 DXCC entities confirmed on QRP, more worked but not (yet) confirmed.
I love hiking and setting up basic field stations so that fits in perfectly with QRP. The very first thing that got me interested in amateur radio was an article in one of the ham magazines, around 1980, that described a guy camping and sitting in his tent working DX with a simple CW rig, that "magic" is still with me!
I have also been involved with SOTA since it's inception but have not been really active for many years after a back problem that spelled the end of my mountain climbing. When POTA came along I saw it as a perfect alternative for SOTA. I am now the South African POTA representative.
My operation is almost 100% CW, only time I might use the microphone is for some local chats on 40m. When activating a POTA entity on CW I can at best expect 3-4 local QSO's, if I am lucky, the rest needs to be DX and often long distance DX of over 8000km so selecting the right time of day and band conditions are vital to get the needed 10 QSO's, great challenge!
I am also sometimes active from my yacht SV Katti (53 foot Bruce Roberts), mostly as ZS6DX/mm.
Hope to work some of the members here in the future on CW, any speed form 10-65wpm is fine!
Thanks for creating this environment and adding me Thomas! Love the like-minded discussions.
73, Rudi de ZS2M/ZS6DX/ZS1BT/V51VE
Web page: https://qsl.net/zs2m/